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Hook Camping is a Symptom of Wider Issues

I’ll try to keep this short because I’d really appreciate if the devs gave it a skim. I play this game more than any other and am pretty passionate about it.

Hook camping is not a fun thing to do or have done to you. Everyone knows so, however I believe it’s a symptom of a wider issue, maybe best characterized in the following two ways:

1) There’s too much incentive to check hooks as killer

This is especially true for survivors hooked pretty central in the map and of killers with high mobility because it costs less and less time to do. I’ll swing close-ish to hooks after most unsuccessful gen patrols I do, or head straight for hook if I catch even faint scratch marks moving in the hooked’s general direction, or whenever a gen is completed, or when the hooked reaches 20% time remaining and be terribly likely to ensure a kill/down. The reward and likeliness of finding survivors unhooking under these circumstances especially makes, if not face camping, then prioritizing the hooked as an objective tantalizing and efficient.

2) The unhooked almost invariably pays for bad unhooks

To some extent the hooked is at the mercy of his allies. This is how it ought to be to some extent, being unable to contribute to objectives and taking time to unhook safely. It is taken too far, however, and into pretty unfun territory when a hooked survivor can be killed without chance to recover by any of the following common scenarios: a) survivor in chase close by/within eyeline of killer; b) unhooked <20 meters from the killer; c) face-camped by killer; d) allies are so far away they have to sprint straight toward the hook to stand a chance at an unhook, thus causing scenario a or b. In each of these cases, yes it is possible that killers will attack the unhooker, but that’s pretty much just to try and be nice, which should not be the balancing factor of a game. There’s no reason not to kill the one who’s both closer to death hook, and already wounded (excepting in some cases the possibility of borrowed time. That’s another issue but suffice it to say it’s not enough to fix this one at hand).

Conclusion: my point in all of this is to say that there is an issue with hook camping, but more fundamentally with how hooks function in the game. This is why countering hook camping some of the ways I’ve seen on these forums is insufficient. They only fix one or maybe two of the issues of hooks.

Solutions: I don’t have any easy ideas. It seems like this demands something as large scale as the endgame collapse changes.

Now, this isn’t the main point of this post, but I’d be remiss to omit the ideas I HAVE had.

Introduce a new objective/unhooking method for survivors. Something like a king of the hill somewhere on the map where if the survivor can stay immersed in it, i.e. not in chase, it both halts the hook timer for his ally (allies?) and upon being hidden in the area for thirty seconds, frees the hooked ally (or allies) with some kind of impunity. Either a teleportation/release from the entity, maybe into a closet or some cool #########, or just with a simple borrowed time effect. I know this reads like an overly enthusiastic fan-fiction but I think some fix of this caliber would be great for the game.

What do you guys think?

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